


Inaction Inertia

by idiotbrothers



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, John Winchester's Questionable Parenting, Mental Health Issues, Minor Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester, Minor Tyson Brady/Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester, Minor Tyson Brady/Sam Winchester, Multi, Retrospective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 06:51:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3240317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idiotbrothers/pseuds/idiotbrothers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What might have been different about Sam's life if he'd been born with the ability to see demons' true faces, on top of the other unfavorable hands that fate dealt him? This story touches on the mental distress that canon events could have caused Sam, while adding another layer to the malaise of Sam's struggles over the seasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inaction Inertia

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for the [Sam Winchester Big Bang. ](http://samwinchesterbigbang.tumblr.com/) Thanks to the wonderful [ mimblexwimble ](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mimblexwimble)for the beta and to my lovely artist, [ girl-of-braids](http://girl-of-braids.tumblr.com/), for bringing scenes of this story to life. Check out the [ art masterpost](http://girl-of-braids.tumblr.com/post/109247725183/so-heres-more-art-for-the-sam-winchester-big) and leave a kind word!

                                                                     

* * *

Supposedly, after Sam had been born, he'd cried for three straight hours. It had been the strangest thing, or so Dad used to say--he'd come out relatively silent and wide-eyed, a quietly curious baby...but the second he'd looked up at the nurse that was handling him, he'd burst into noisy tears, and had carried on like that long after the family had left the hospital and settled him into his crib at the house.  
  
Dean still liked to tell that story, joke about how Sam's frequent and inexplicable tantrums as an infant were an early sign of what a bitch he'd grow up to be. _Barely out of the womb and you screamed your lungs out the whole evening_ , Dean would say. _Like you'd seen a ghost or somethin'_.  
  
Here, Sam would usually mutter, _Or something_ , and ponder bringing up the popular superstitious belief that babies and young children were more keenly attuned to the astral plane than adults were. Inevitably, however, he'd let the subject slip out of his grasp and move on to something else. He had no intention of handing his most hated secret to Dean on a plate, so it would be pointless to bring it up.

* * *

Sam's first day of kindergarten wasn't going well. He'd clung to Dean's leg in the doorway of the classroom until Dad had gently pried him off and told him, "You'll see Dean in a little while, okay? Just gotta get through today and you'll be fine." Sam had sniffled mournfully at that, giving Dean his mooniest, most pitiful look, but Dean had just set his mouth in a stern line and said, "C'mon, Sammy, you can't stay home forever."  
  
"Yes, I can!" Sam insisted stubbornly, re-attaching himself to Dean's leg. "You gotta learn n' stuff," Dean protested weakly, pulling Sam off and crouching so that they were face to face. "Wanna learn with _you_ ," Sam said, eyes beginning to tear up, and Dean shook his head. "You're pretty much smarter than me already, remember? C'mon. I bet you'll like it here; just stick it out and you'll see. 'Kay?" And Sam had nodded reluctantly, and Dean had kissed him on the nose before ruffling his hair and following after Dad without another word said between them. Now Sam was valiantly trying to keep from crying all over his coloring book, missing Dean and Dad and feeling antagonized by the kid sitting next to him who'd swiped most of his crayons and scowled at him threateningly.  
  
Unbeknownst to him, his worries were about to be eclipsed by a different problem entirely, one of a unique make that would chase him for years to come. "Children," came the voice of his teacher, Mrs. P, "This is my assistant, Alice. She'll collect your work and put it up on the Wall of Fame. Say _Hello, Alice_."  
  
"Hello, Alice," droned the kids, and Sam joined them distractedly, focused on trying to polish the half-hearted mess he'd been making of his coloring sheet. A minute or so later, and someone was standing over his shoulder, a sweet, feminine voice asking him, "Would you like to turn yours in now?" Sam looked over at the speaker.  
  
Suddenly, it was like all the air had been sucked out of the room. The red crayon that Sam had been gripping clattered to the floor, his eyes locked on Alice's face, limbs turned to jelly. A quiet, rattling gasp leaked out of Sam's mouth. "What's wrong, sweetie?" Sam's head was spinning, his heart pounding out of his chest, and the next thing he knew, the edges of his vision were going fuzzy, and there was a dull pain in the center of his forehead.

* * *

"I'm worried about him, Dad. Passing out in the middle of class like that...and he's been drawing all these creepy pictures ever since, these, like--"

"I don't wanna hear it. Your brother'll be fine. We've got enough to worry about right now without coddling him through his first week of school."

"But Dad, he's--"

"Dean. I know how close you boys are, but we can't be getting too soft on him. Gotta raise him right if he's gonna be joining us when he's your age."

"...Yes, sir."

Sam scrambled away from the door when he heard Dean's footsteps approaching, raced across the hall and into their room, tucking himself into bed and pretending to be asleep just in time for Dean to walk in.  
  
“Sammy?”  
  
Sam kept quiet, steadying his breaths because he knew Dean could tell when he was faking. Dean slipped into bed next to him after a minute or two had ticked by, and Sam forced himself to be still, breaths sounding harsh and deafeningly loud in the unbroken silence. He buried his face in his pillow and didn’t ask Dean the question that was burning a hole in his chest, running it through his mind over and over again instead. _What’s wrong with me?  
_

* * *

"Sam, I've had enough of this. _Look up_ when people are talking to you." Dad's no-nonsense voice bit through Sam's anxiety and had him shuffling his feet and peeking at Dean out of the corner of his eye. Dean swallowed and avoided his eyes skittishly. That was starting to become a running trend with him. "Fine," Sam mumbled, raising his gaze to the cashier but keeping his head bowed.  
  
"No worries, kid," the thing said. (Its name-tag read 'Hank', but Hank had endless, warping, pitch-black caverns for eyes and two sets of churning mandibles, thin trails of putrid-smelling smoke seeping out of its puckered nostrils and staining the collar of its uniform; so Sam couldn't think of it as a 'he'.)  
  
"I was just asking if you knew my nephew, Rob Steele. I think I've seen you around the middle school before."

Sam wondered how sharp Hank's crooked horns were, if they could be used to impale him and splatter his blood all over the nearby rack of tabloid magazines. "Whatever," Sam said absently, watching Hank's jagged collection of off-color teeth gnash with a sort of horrified captivation. " _Sam_ ," John barked irritably at him, but didn't rebuke him further, apologizing briefly to the cashier and dragging them out of the store. Sam felt Hank's gaping eyes on him as they left, wanted to yell at it to leave him the fuck alone but knowing he'd probably just get another trip to the local child therapist for his efforts.  
  
Dad left the second he deposited Sam and Dean back at the apartment, departing with a terse, "Watch your brother", and slamming the door shut behind him, not even bothering to explain where he was going. "He gets friendlier every day," Sam observed glibly, and Dean frowned at him, said, "Yeah, 'cause you make things so much easier on him, freak-job."  
  
"Shut the hell up, Dean," Sam snapped, storming into his room and shutting the door, his hands curled into painful fists and a strangled sob catching in his throat. He lay motionlessly in bed for a good half-hour, staring blankly at the ceiling as it warped and twisted and formed cruel, grotesque faces, the cracked plaster and water stains blending together along with the memory of every monster he'd ever laid eyes on before.  
  
After he slipped into a fitful sleep, he found himself stuck in a dream where he was trying to keep his footing on an oddly slippery floor, and there were rough hands yanking him about from different directions. When he looked up, it was to a grainy, ashy substance trickling down his face and into his mouth, weighing his tongue down and rendering him speechless. When he looked down, it was to his own bare feet, coated in blood. Blood as far as he could see, stretching on endlessly around him, interspersed by suspicious fleshy chunks and sharp bits that wound up between his toes as he tripped and splashed about uselessly, the disembodied hands tugging at him one time too many. There was a vague, reedy screaming noise funneling through his ears, sounding as muffled as if he were underwater. And then he was bolting upright in bed, and Dean was holding him as his arms thrashed about, and the screaming was coming from _him_.  
  
He cut himself off, smearing his tears into Dean's shoulder and letting him stroke his hair and shush him. " 'M sorry, Sam," Dean said, drawing soothing circles over Sam's trembling back. Sam couldn't respond, but he burrowed his head gratefully against Dean's chest, trying to comfort himself with the steady rise and fall of his brother's breaths.

* * *

_"Why do you draw these pictures, Sam?" The doctor asked him, spreading out the contents of the file for Sam to see, dozens of scribblings he'd made over time that Dean had apparently been gathering together to use against him. Sam bit his lip and stared at his Skechers, considering. This new doctor had a normal face, at least, not like the last one Dad had tried taking him to. Sam had started crying soundlessly at the sight of_ that _doctor, and had done his best to hide himself behind Dad's legs until he agreed to take him home._  
  
 _Dad and Dean were waiting outside now, and he wished he hadn't nodded when the doctor asked if Sam would be okay with talking to him alone. "Can you tell me anything about the pictures?" The doctor tried instead, picking one out and sliding it around on the desk to face Sam. He blinked nervously at it, eyes flitting away from its dark strokes and the yawning black maw taking up most of the page. He remembered drawing it after he'd quietly woken from a nightmare, hand moving almost automatically as he dragged his black crayon jaggedly over paper, holding it like it was a knife and he was stabbing into the face he was drawing, assassinating it in his mind. The old lady feeding pigeons in the park, the man with a big leather briefcase who'd bumped into Dean yesterday, Tammy Fujimoto who lived across the street and said hi to them from her front yard after school. Their faces were all wrong (so, so wrong), but Sam couldn't say so because everyone would look at him funny if he did, tell him to stop making up stories._  
  
 _"Some people have bad faces," Sam explained in a tiny voice, kicking his feet restlessly under the desk. "I draw them 'cause nobody else can see them."_

_"I see," the doctor said, crossing his hands. "Do I have a bad face?" Sam looked up from the whorls in his knuckles to the man's face, sparse hairs combed over his bald spot and eyes kind, somehow, like Pastor Jim's. Sam shook his head. The doctor wrote something down on his notepad. Sam wished he wouldn't do that. "You've just entered the first grade, isn't that right, Sam? How is it treating you so far?" Sam shrugged. "How long have you been drawing these faces?" Sam winced, clasping his hands over his knees._ Since Alice.

* * *

"Don't touch me," Sam said brusquely to the girl (not a girl) Dean had brought home, her filmy eyelids sliding sideways over her distorted pupils as she huffed at Dean with annoyance. "Your little brother's kind of a jerk," she stage-whispered, mottled arms crossed over her chest and talons of her hands shifting. Sam could count the ridges of her elongated spine when she turned away.  
  
After she did them a favor and finally left, the pair of eyeballs embedded at the nape of her neck glaring at Sam before the door closed behind her, Dean directed a full-on scowl at Sam, his hand shooting out to cuff him on the back of the head. "Why do you gotta act like that all the time, huh?" Sam chewed on his bottom lip angrily. _Why do you gotta look at me like I'm crazy when I'm just trying to warn you?_  
  
"The fuck do you care how I talked to her? You don't even know her last name," Sam said instead, focusing on the homework he had spread out over the coffee table.  
  
"Not the fucking point. What is this, anyway? Are you jealous? Is that why you keep--"  
  
"No way," Sam said loudly, scratching off a line of calculus he'd attempted too hastily. "God, you're such an egomaniac," Sam added under his breath, and Dean grabbed him by the shoulders abruptly, looking him right in the eye. "Hey. You've been weirder than usual lately, and I can't fuckin' figure out why. You're driving me up the wall, kid."  
  
"I'm not a kid anymore," Sam said, pushing Dean off and trying to get back to his homework, to broadcast that he was Totally Not Having this conversation. "And neither are you, by the way. Jesus. Aren't you getting a little old to be bringing girls back here like you did in high school?" Dean bristled. "Well, where else am I supposed to take 'em?"

"I dunno. The backseat of Dad's car, for all I care. Just as long as I don't have to listen to it." Dean rolled his eyes and left him alone after that, evidently giving up on his valiant quest to ply Sam's peeves from him and get him crying into Dean's chest like he used to when he was a dumb, perpetually scared kid. Back when he didn't know better and kept ending up in the offices of assorted hack psychologists and even a witch doctor or two, none of whom could give Dad a verdict he was satisfied with.  
  
He wasn't keen on revisiting that part of his life anytime soon, and he had a plan, see. He'd started looking into colleges almost as soon as he'd started high school, researching scholarship opportunities and price ranges and fields of study. When he graduated in a couple years, he was getting out, away from the wary, fed-up stares of his dad and his brother and away from his goddamn never-ending hunter training. Away from the constant nightmares and the self-doubt and the sense that he was surrounded by evil, creeping in on him from all sides and waiting to snuff him when he let his guard down even a fraction.  
  
If he traveled across the country to some rich university town, maybe he could actually outrun the things that stalked him. Maybe he'd feel better without people he lived in cramped quarters with always making him doubt his sanity, even while he kept what he'd never stopped seeing to himself.  
  
When Dad got home that night, he and Sam argued again for what was probably the millionth time, started over a triviality and escalating into deeply personal insults that had Sam slamming the door to his room so hard that the frame rattled. Dean didn't come in to talk to him, though some part of Sam sort of wanted him to, craved that bond they'd had when they were younger. But no, these days Sam was just _fuckin' weird_ all the time, just spouting off for the sake of it, and Dean ended up siding with their dad more often than not.  
  
 _I'm getting out_ , Sam thought to himself fiercely as his eyelids fluttered shut. _Two more years and they'll be rid of me_.

* * *

"What's going on in that big head of yours?"  
  
Sam turned over to glance at Brady, who was sitting up and squinting at him in the dark, his finger trailing ticklishly soft over Sam's arm. "Nothin'," Sam rasped, his voice rough with sleep. "Go back to bed."  
  
"You have bad dreams practically every night," Brady mused, "Did you know that?" Sam scoffed, blowing a piece of hair out of his eyes. "Yeah, kinda hard to miss. You got any more inane questions for me before the birds start singing?" Brady slid under the covers and slung an arm over Sam's waist. "I do, but you always give me crappy answers. I'll crack you eventually, dude." Sam sighed long-sufferingly, but pressed a kiss to Brady's jaw anyway, mouthing "No, you won't," into his hair.  
  
Months later, Brady introduced Sam to his friend Jessica, who was sharp-tongued and gorgeous and super well-read. The three of them hooked up several times before something changed, a very distinct something that gave Sam the disheartening impression that his past had come back to haunt him.  
  
It happened on a muggy, boring Wednesday afternoon, when Sam was stopping by his room after class to pick up some books he wanted to return. The door clicked shut as he stepped in, and he could sense Brady lingering in his periphery, turned to ask him if he should really be cutting his cultural anthropology class for the second time that week, but the words died in his throat at the sight of Brady's face. _Shit_ , Sam thought, heart jackhammering in his chest as he took a subconscious step back, dropping his backpack. "Something wrong, Sam? You look a little pale."  
  
Large insectoid eyes caught the light coming through the window and focused laser-sharp on Sam, mouth a crowded jumble of fangs and tongues. Sam forced himself to look away, swallowing down a swell of bile. "Seriously, what's up? If you're gonna puke, can you not do it on the carpet? We only just got out that stain from when Tom and Aakash came by."  
  
Sam stuttered, hands trembling as he worked through his jangled thoughts. "Just don't--don't look at me," he got out, striding past Brady to the door and walking right out again, ignoring Brady's concerned voice calling his name and instinctively heading for Jessica's dorm. _Not her too_ , he thought, fear and nausea impeding his breaths and leaving him feeling light-headed. To Sam's immense relief, Jessica's face was the same as it had always been, and Sam clung to her the second she opened the door for him, his eyes drinking in her round cheeks and her lips and the mole in the center of her perfect forehead.  
  
"Sam..." She hazarded quietly, obviously taken aback. "What happened?"  
  
"Nothing," Sam said through gritted teeth, needing to pull himself together. "It's nothing. Everything's fine." The foolhardy Winchester mantra. It was serving him as poorly now as it ever had in the past. Clearing his throat, Sam pulled back and asked, "Is Louise still out of town?" Jessica blinked. "Yeah, but what's this ab--"  
  
"Could I stay here for just a couple days, then?"  
  
Jessica frowned knowingly. "Did Brady do something stupid? If you want me to talk to him for you..."

"No, don't," Sam said, shaking his head firmly. "Don't. I, um. I need  space. Just for a little while." Sam stressed that last part, relieved when Jessica tugged him inside by his hand, saying, "I can go grab your stuff for you after my club meeting."

"I really appreciate this, Jess," Sam said, already starting to breathe easier. Jessica merely pressed a soft kiss to his mouth in response, ducking out a second later with her canvas bag in tow.  
  
After that incident, Sam's relationship with Brady more or less fizzled out of existence, whereas his relationship with Jessica only strengthened over time. Of course, he couldn't camp out in Jess's room forever, and so he'd eventually had to request a room change, purposefully ignoring the possibility that Brady _wasn't_ actually a hideous monster and that he was maybe feeling hurt and rejected right about then. Jessica had mentioned something to the effect of that last part only once, but when Sam made it clear that he wasn't open to talking about it, she'd graciously dropped the issue. As far as Sam knew, she and Brady were still friends, and though the thought of Jess spending time with that _thing_ unsettled him, he realized he couldn't do anything about it without risking an unraveling of the normal life he'd carefully crafted for himself at Stanford, and that wasn't a risk he was willing to take.  
  
Until then, he'd been ignoring the other misshapen faces that showed up around campus--in his classrooms, behind the counters at the dining halls--because he'd practically grown used to faking his way through civil interactions with the things, but Brady was a different matter entirely. Now, the old paranoia came slinking back in, lining the walls of his mind and leaving him fixating again, giving any monstrosities he noticed a wide berth, wondering obsessively if he'd wake up one day to see that everyone he knew had grown a new, terrible face overnight; if his reflection in the mirror would one day appear malformed and repulsive. He'd had a dream like that once, long ago. It had made him laugh at the time, hitching, hysterical laughs at how far-fetched a notion it had seemed, but he wasn't laughing now.  
  
The other dreams he'd started having not long after the Brady situation; the ones where Jessica was suspended from the ceiling and eaten up by flame, blood soaking through a nightgown that she'd never wear of her own accord; faded into the backdrop of his matted layer of misgivings, because he'd had ridiculous, nonsensical, crimson-tinged dreams all his life, and these were just more of the same. Or so he'd foolishly thought at the time.

* * *

Not too long after Sam got back on the road with Dean, he learned that the faces he'd been seeing were those of demons.  
  
The knowledge, plucked from the tangential realization that what Dad had been relentlessly tracking down was a creature spawned from the depths of Hellfire itself, didn't so much relieve him as it did agonize him further. If he hadn't been running from this for as long as he could remember, he would likely have known sooner what it was he was up against, the very real danger that these things posed to him and to those he loved. He might have saved Jessica from the fate that had been spelled out for him in echoic nightmares.  
  
His resentment for his father burned a little hotter at the discovery, because John had presumably had an inkling about the existence of demons long before Sam and Dean did, and he'd been contributing to the demonology lore without even consulting his grown-up, monster-hunting sons about it. Sam expressed this to Dean in no uncertain terms, and flirted with the idea of finally breaking it to him--the news that for some vaguely  disturbing reason, Sam had been burdened with the fucking sixth sense since he'd been crawling around in diapers. At the very least, there was a good chance that Dean would actually believe him now, instead of having him institutionalized. Hell, Dad had probably connected the dots when he'd started tracking down info on the existence of demons and realized that Sam's nutty childhood episodes were based in the supernatural. The possibility made Sam especially eager to track down John so he could punch him in the face for not cluing him in the second he'd found out.  
  
Meeting Meg, whose face looked almost regal compared to those of others he'd met (she looked less like some miscreant cobbled together from bits of ugly deep-sea creatures and more like a gargoyle, which practically made her ravishing by comparison), sort of threw him for a loop. For once, his curiosity as a hunter was overpowering his fear as a guy with strange powers of perception that he didn't want anything to do with, and he decided he'd pretend like he was buying her little act.  
  
It went pretty well up until she tried to kill him and Dean for the first time, unfazed by the knowledge that he'd been onto her. And then, of course, she went and possessed him.  
  
Sam spent a week railing against her, recoiling at the sight of her face perched atop his body when she gleefully parked them in front of any reflective surface, crooning, _Don't you think we look pretty this way, Sammy? Don't you think I wear your body like it was made for me?_  
  
While Sam had watched with muted horror as Meg murdered Steve Wandell, assaulted Jo, knocked Dean around till he was bleeding and dazed; her sadistic pleasure had thrummed under his skin, leaving him disoriented and sickened with himself, unable to tell where his feelings ended and Meg's began. Meg had murmured to him, _See, you're enjoying this too, aren't you? Love feeling big brother's face give out under your fists, don't you, Boy Wonder? Know why? It's because you're one of us. You'll fight it and fight it, but soon, you're gonna grow up big and strong and twisted, and this pathetic, simpering face is gonna stretch into one worthy of the path you've got winding ahead of you_.

_No_ , Sam had pushed at her, writhing and jerking with all the mental energy he could muster, refusing to react the way she wanted him to. _Demons lie_ rang out through his mind, and she laughed out loud, throwing Dean into the wall. Meg rifled through Sam's memories and picked out the one where Dean had told Sam what Dad had impressed upon him that day in the hospital, right before he'd gone and died on them.  
  
 _He said that I might have to kill you, Sammy_ , Meg reiterated in a mocking impersonation of Dean's voice. _The old man really had it in for you, didn't he, baby? Well, you can rest easy now. His skin's bubbling off his bones as we speak, and I'm about to send your wretched brother down there with him_.  
  
It had only been a few minutes later that Bobby had crept forward and seared off the binding link, kicking Meg out of Sam's body in a whirl of stinging pain and the acrid smell of sulfur, but Sam remained rattled enough for the rest of that week (and much of the next one), that he couldn't even think about bringing up his dirty little secret to Dean. The guy had too much morbid shit to mull over as it was without Sam dumping more baggage on him.  
  
The one silver lining that Sam could grasp onto was that his _inner eye_ (or whatever) really came in handy on demon hunts; Dean was starting to get suspicious about how quickly Sam could discern between Jo Schmoes and occupied meatsuits. Oh well. Just another thing for Dean to vaguely worry about because he was allergic to voicing serious concerns until somebody's life was on the line. The subsequent annoyance Sam felt smelled a bit like hypocrisy, but Sam figured Dean already knew that according to John Winchester and to the host of demons trailing Sam in the shadows, he was destined to metamorphose into a big bad, so this secret he was keeping was just another drop in the half-full cup that portended Sam's moral degeneration.

* * *

The doctor Sam had been assigned to at Glenwood Springs wasn't asking him the usual sort of questions. He wondered how Dean was faring with _his_ psychiatrist, Dr. Cartwright, whom he'd done some quick research on along with most of the rest of the hospital staff. He must've missed his own doctor's name on the roster, because he didn't know anything about her, and she was beginning to make him uncomfortable. Then again, the psychoanalytical approach to therapy wasn't exactly designed for the comfort of the patient.  
  
"I've been informed that the relationship you have with your brother is a bit of a stifling one. Would you describe it that way?" Sam fidgeted. "Do we have to talk about Dean? Shouldn't you be asking me about traumatic childhood memories, or something?" _'Cause I've got a trunkful of those_.  
  
Dr. Maloney tapped her pen on her desk as she answered. "You and Dean were admitted here at the same time. I think it's safe to say that there may be some overlap in your diagnoses, that shared circumstances of your upbringing and your current lives together will be very relevant to this process. But since you brought it up, I will ask: are there any specific situations that you'd like to expand on in today's session?"  
  
"Sure," Sam said, eyeing the clock on the wall behind her and looking forward to meeting up with Martin so they could get started on their real reason for being there. "I can see the faces of demons. I've been able to do it for as long as I can remember, but nobody else really knows about it. I mean, my dad might have had an idea towards the end of his life, but yeah, he's dead and gone."  
  
The doctor widened her eyes at him ever so slightly.  
  
"Demons."  
  
"Yeah," Sam said, crossing his arms over his chest. "To everybody else, they look like regular people, but I can tell what they really are."  
  
"Hmm. And how much would you say that this ability's impacted your quality of life?"  
  
"Oh, I'd say it's been a pretty big deal. The bastards have been on my tail since I was a baby. They've got this plan for me, or whatever, and I'm supposed to, like, let Lucifer possess me and ride my body into the ultimate derby finals." When the doctor just stared bewilderedly at him, he clarified, "The apocalypse. Sorry, Dean's vocab sticks with me sometimes."  
  
"Ah, I see."  
  
"Uh-huh. It's hilarious when I say it out loud, isn't it. I would say that there's no goddamn way I'm letting the devil co-opt my body, 'cause I've been through that before--demon named Meg, back in '06--and I'm not keen on it happening again anytime soon, but I." Sam stopped abruptly, gazing thoughtfully into the middle distance and picking at a thread on the hem of his shirt.  
  
"Sam?"  
  
"I, um...I'm just afraid. That I won't be able to walk away from him. 'Cause three or four years ago, I would've thought I'd die before walking down this road they've got all rigged up for me, but I kind of already fucked up the way they expected me to. I'm talking globally. I was a mess last year, and I still am, and I know Dean's in this place where he's almost wondering whether he shouldn't have killed me three years ago like he was supposed to. He wouldn't even have had to do it himself, y'know, somebody else did the job for him. Stabbed right through my spine. He could've left me there in the mud and saved himself a world of trouble, but he didn't. And here we are now."  
  
The doctor stared at him some more, and he stared right back, tilting his head as he offered her a bitter little smile. "Our time's up now," he pointed out after several silent minutes, standing and sticking his hands into his pockets.  
  
"See you tomorrow, Doctor," he added as an afterthought, well aware that with any luck, he and Dean would be out of there before they could make it to their second appointments the next day. 

* * *

_Demon_ , Sam repeated to himself, _Dean’s a demon_. Ever since he’d caught the glint of Dean’s pitch-black eyes in the security footage at the department store, he’d had to dismiss the dozens of flimsy alternate explanations that his brain kept throwing at him.  
  
A tiny, bitter part of Sam wasn’t entirely surprised at this turn of events, but the rest of him was loudly protesting it, unable to process that his brother had been corrupted so thoroughly. Sam had been hounded by demons his whole life, had been set to cross over to their side since those first few droplets of poisonous blood touched his lips. And yet, Dean was the one who’d wound up straying to the end of that path. Dean, who loathed demons with a passion that might have even surpassed Sam’s; because he’d been down there too, he’d seen their rotten, gnarled faces, felt just how their blood-soaked claws and their corroded teeth could tear flesh and crunch bones.  
  
Sam tried to concoct an image of it in his head, a hazy sketch of what Dean’s face would look like now, his familiar features melted away and replaced with ugly, otherworldy ones, but he couldn’t. His perceptive power didn’t work through video footage and photographs, so the Dean he’d watched on the screen didn’t look much different from his usual self. Until they met in person, Sam could hope that Dean was somehow different from the rest, that he would reluctantly come around if Sam sought him out, because he was still his big brother, and they’d always had leverage over one another.  
  
When they _did_ meet in person, and Sam was staring right into the gaping hollows where Dean’s eyes should have been, the last of his naivete withered away.

**Author's Note:**

> If the ending seems a little rushed, that's because it was. I had wanted to include more flashbacks to Sam's childhood (including one bullying incident involving a speech impediment that he was temporarily afflicted with), and a portion about Sam's relationship with the angels (specifically Lucifer, Michael, and Gadreel) that would have brought out some parallels that I'd been inclined to explore. I doubt that I'll ever write a follow-up to this fic, so I'm kinda bummed that I didn't have a chance to lengthen it. But all that's neither here nor there, as long as the story came together cohesively in the end! *Crosses fingers*


End file.
